Rosarians differentiate old roses from modern roses by one horticultural event. Modern roses stem from the origin of the first hybrid tea, ‘La France,’ in 1867. Old roses are all classes of roses existing prior to 1867 including alba, bourbon, centifolia, china, damask, gallica, moss, musk, noisette and tea.
The Old Rose Garden at Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina is an educational exhibit to inspire interest in gardening with old roses.
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At one time roses were segregated into separate beds exclusively devoted to roses.
This monoculture of roses tended to breed disease and insect infestations.
The Old Rose Garden at Riverbanks demonstrates a different design format, one that integrates roses into the landscape. It features roses in mixed borders and beds of annuals, perennials, vines, grasses and shrubs that complement each other. The figure-ground organization changes with the season. In fall, for example, asters, chrysanthemums, gomphrenia and salvias are companions to late blooming roses.
Old Garden Roses and Southern Heritage
Old roses are an integral part of the history of the South. Old roses are synonymous with the Southern lifestyle and were found on sprawling plantations, courtyard gardens, sharecropper cottages, family cemeteries, and along roadside ditches. Grandmothers linked the roses across generations. They received cuttings of family roses for their home and then passed along cuttings to kin and friends as living reminders of heritage. Family histories could be written in roses.
These intergenerational roses were tenacious, tough, and long-lived. Their growth habits were either a large shrub or climbing vine. Most came programmed by nature to be highly fragrant, colored in muted tones or pastel shades of white, pink or yellow, winter-hardy, and exceedingly pest and disease resilient.
South Carolina was the birthplace of one old garden rose class, the Noisette. Historical records indicate that Philippe Noisette, a French horticulturist came to live in Charleston in the early 1800s. He befriended neighbor John Champney, a rice planter, and gave him ‘Old Blush,’ a repeat-blooming China rose. Champney crossed it with a fragrant musk rose creating ‘Champney’s Pink Cluster.’
In Southern gentleman fashion Champney gifted Noisette with seedlings of his rose. Noisette planted the seeds of ‘Champney’s Pink Cluster’ and produced ‘Blush Noisette.’ The craze to breed Noisettes in Europe and the United States started in 1817. Riverbanks displays one of the largest public collections of Noisettes found anywhere. Many private gardens in Charleston grow Noisettes as well.
Safe maintenance and low maintenance are goals of public and private gardens. Time and labor toiling with heavy fertilization, battling bugs, fogging fungus, and heavy pruning is eliminated with old roses.
Once sited in the right environment with six-hours of sunlight, compost rich friable soil, and sufficient water, old roses thrive on their genetics.
Riverbanks Botanical Garden is dedicated to conservation of natural and human resources. They do not spray chemicals on their garden plants. Since soil is the foundation of a successful garden, horticulturists at Riverbanks have created a soil that absorbs water and nutrients and drains well. Old roses are naturally resistant to insect pests and diseases.
Most old rose classes require minimal pruning to remove dead or damaged canes or interior twiggy growth. With old roses a pruner is used more for taking cuttings than for relentless cutting back.
Riverbanks Old Rose Garden introduces visitors to lost and found roses. Over time rose identities become masked. Abandoned homesteads, roadside ditches, construction sites and gravestones may contain forgotten roses.
Groups of rosarians conduct search and rescue missions to find, preserve, propagate and identify lost roses. These raiders of the lost rose are known as rose rustlers. Until the found specimen is positively identified, it is given a provisional name in double quotation marks. One such rose at Riverbanks bears the label: ‚”Highway 290 Pink Buttons.”
Old roses are a frontier field of scientific and personal adventure for the future.
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